Gimlet Media

It still holds up today.

You see, Alex built a podcasting company called Gimlet Media from nothing and recorded the whole messy business of it.

The good pitches, the terrible ones, the arguments.

It changed how I think about content, about business, about, you know, all of it.

we don't have, you know, Radiotopia behind us.

We don't have Gimlet or whatever.

It's just us.

And now it's two.

Well, because obviously a lot of it was down to podcasting being in its infancy and people not knowing how to do stuff.

But there was a while where nominally, professionally produced podcasts, like in Gimlet or something, did have a kind of...

Because I guess they were probably, they may have been made, because radio play production technique probably wasn't, it probably may be a dying, being a dying art by the 2010s.

So what they were doing was TV pacing.

The On Air 100 lists 100 moments that have shaped the events of the industry.

including Spotify buying Gimlet and Anchor in 2019.

That was the year that started my this.

That's what started my anger of Spotify.

I hate them.

They bought Gimlet and Anchor.

And then they ended up buying Megaphone, which was an amazing, beautiful, fantastic platform.

And now it's just a platform.

So th- that, that took time to, to layer in place.

We, uh, moved from, uh, the NBA's office on Fifth Avenue to, uh, the former office of Gimlet Media in Brooklyn.

We, we needed a more creative space to build a, you know, social-first digital business.

So in addition to mapping out the product and, like, building out the right team, there was a fair amount of infrastructural work, uh, necessary to, to get this, uh, new version of the business, this updated version of the business spun up.

I mean, you don't, like...

So when we first met, like, in Gimlet, in podcast world, there were not video podcasts.

People wouldn't, like, recognize you on the street if you had a podcast, right? And so, you know, and also, like, being a marine biologist, and my first jobs were in, like, the federal bureaucracy at EPA and NOAA in the policy office, and I thought that was gonna be my whole life, like, as a public servant or as, like, maybe a manager of some small team in a nonprofit.

Like, I didn't have any of those ambitions, and so the whole thing is just, like, extremely weird to me that anyone knows who I am.

At the time, she was running audio at BuzzFeed.

Max and I just kept hearing from interesting people who were like, "We'd love to have your help making a show." I think Gimlet had just launched.

There were a couple of networks at the time, but there was nobody who was doing, like, high-level production with partners.

We didn't necessarily need to own it.

Reply All became a massive hit and was started as a side project of some people at WNYC.

WNYC didn't want it.

It went to Gimlet, and it's probably the reason that Gimlet sold for so much money is that show.

How long was Pineapple Street around? And tell me about the exit.